Ken Brill, the man who defined the data center, dies

Patrick Thibodeau |
Aug. 2, 2013

The founder of the UpTime Institute, Kenneth G. Brill, died Tuesday. He is credited with playing an enormous role in shaping the modern data center industry.

Brill likened the problem facing cloud providers to the problem facing Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. It was relatively problem free for 40 years, but then an earthquake and tsunami struck with enormous consequence. Those events exposed weaknesses in the system, which exacerbated the problems.

"There will always be an advocate for how it can be done cheaper, [but] if you haven't had a failure for five years -- who is the advocate for reliability?" said Brill. "My prediction is that in the years ahead, we will see more failures than we have been seeing, because people have forgotten what we had to do to get to where we are."